Sympathy Comes From the Heart, Empathy Comes From the Mind
Empathy is at the core of Design Thinking and Human-Centered Design. It helps to ensure we’re asking the right questions and solving the right problems. But as the term “empathy” has found its way into the corporate lexicon, its definition has muddied. People may be saying empathy, but they’re practicing sympathy. Pity for someone doesn’t help you solve for them, perspective does.
Years ago, as a design student, I was assigned a project to solve for someone with a disability. I chose blindness. To understand the experience of blindness, taped my eyes closed before going to bed one night and when I woke up I spent the next day living as if I was blind. In the beginning, all the problems that I experienced were those of a sighted person suddenly unable to see. It wasn’t until roughly 8 hours into the experiment that I became comfortable with my new “normal”. I stopped experiencing the world as someone with sight who had lost it and instead began to experience the world from a whole new perspective. Perspective is seeing how comfortable I was with navigating my apartment, and how quickly I learned the layout. Perspective was also the experience of feeling ignored and shut out of a conversation by a clerk at a store while there with my friend. Understanding the normal of someone’s situation means seeing it holistically. The everyday, the positive and the negative.
When Sympathy Gets in the Way
In the context of design and problem solving, it’s disrespectful to take a position of sympathy. It creates too much distance between oneself and a situation. Sympathy and pity are a reaction to a situation we either aren’t familiar with or don’t want to be part of. It’s not the proper lens in which to view people you’re solving for. Having sympathy for someone may inspire you to help them but you never get close enough to the experience to take their perspective.
In my blindness experiment, sympathy sounded like this: “That must be so sad to never see what your loved one looks like. I feel so bad for them. I want to help them!” Through that lens we would be solving for a problem that WE have with their experience, not one they have. By immersing myself in the blindness experiment, I took a very different perspective of interacting with a loved one. That afternoon my girlfriend and I were sitting on the couch, she was watching tv and I was listening. I realized when I was holding her hand I could feel the ridges of her fingerprints, the distinct layers of skin muscle and bone, the micro twitches in her muscles as she shifts her hand. It was a connection to another human unlike any I had experienced before. (Note: She is now my wife and bless her heart for putting up with me and my experiments in immersion as you’ll read about in a little bit.)
There is a time and a place for sympathy. But when it becomes the primary motivator in the problem-solving process, it is selfish because by solving their problem we feel good about ourselves. Empathy doesn’t allow for a buffer between the pain and discomfort of someone else’s experience. It requires us to embrace the experience to gain their perspective and better understand how to solve for them. You’re able to surface problems based on their circumstances, regardless of your own perceptions, assumptions and judgements, and find the right solutions to address those problems.
Are You Using Empathy or Sympathy?
“For me to share in someone else’s perspective, I must do more than put myself into his position. Instead, I must imagine myself as him, and, more than that, imagine myself as him in the particular situation in which he finds himself.”
Neel Burton M.D.
I once began solving a problem motivated by sympathy, and wasted a lot of time and resources before realizing what I was doing. For outpatient chemotherapy, patients carry around a pump about the size of paperback book and a 500ml IV bag for several days. While designing a product to make this treatment easier for patients, I assumed that what I was solving for was a literal problem. These are hard to carry, what’s a better way to carry them? I built several prototypes that did this job well. But as my conversations got deeper, patients revealed more about their thoughts and feelings. Instead of complaining about the equipment, they talked about being uncomfortable and embarrassed going out in public. They talked about how people would stare at them carrying around their treatment equipment. Some patients refused to leave the house because they didn’t want to be constantly reminded they were battling cancer. Carrying the equipment wasn’t the root problem, it was a condition of the bigger problem; people couldn’t live normal lives during treatment. My goal changed to designing a product that would make the equipment invisible on the patient.
I wore my next prototypes for several days. By living with the product and a simulated equipment set up, I could see if the people around me noticed I was wearing it. Eventually the product went to market, and in a matter of days, patients reached out to say they were comfortable going back to work, playing with their kids, going on dates and living a normal life while on treatment. At the start, I was solving for these patients from a position of sympathy. I saw a problem, I felt bad and I wanted to help. It wasn’t until I had deep conversations and put myself in their perspective that I was able to understand real problem.
There are several questions you can ask yourself to help make sure you’re in an empathetic mindset.
1. Do I care about this person and their suffering (sympathy) or do I feel their suffering (empathy)?
2. Am I reacting to their experience the way I would (sympathy) or do I understand their experience from their perspective (empathy)?
3. Is the problem I see my issue with the situation (sympathy) or is it the problem that they see (empathy)?
Empathy is about Vulnerability
As humans, our default reaction when confronted with a situation less fortunate than our own is sympathy. There is safety in the distance that sympathy provides. It’s only natural to avoid discomfort or challenging our own world view. But if you are going to use empathy, you need to understand and accept that it requires you to be vulnerable. To be comfortable with the uncomfortable. Empathy requires the suspension of ego, of self, and of your own assumptions to see the world from another person’s perspective. By no means are you able to replicate their experience. That’s not the intent. Instead, you’re looking to understand their experience, absent of your assumptions about the world. You’re looking to understand, to the best of your ability, their perspective of the situation. This makes you better informed to identify pain points and solutions.
During a project related to PTSD, I immersed myself in the topic so completely that I put myself and my wife in danger. I spent my days going through articles, interviews and videos of individuals talking about their experiences with PTSD. My own lifelong struggles with depression and anxiety began to resurface. Late one evening as my wife and I were in bed, I had an episode where I believed someone had broken into our house to kill us. It wasn’t a nightmare. I was fully awake and yelling when I threw myself at the intruder and grabbed them. They wrestled themselves free to turn on the light, and I jolted back to reality when I saw I had pinned down my wife. She was screaming and crying. Fortunately, no one was hurt. I had never experienced an episode like that ever in my life and hope I never do so again. I learned so much about how an episode like that affects not only the person but their family as well, and brought that back into my work. I share this story as an extreme example of how vulnerability allowed me to gain perspective. No one should put themselves in danger to gain perspective.
Empathy Isn’t a Switch, It’s a Skill. Go Practice!
Empathy isn’t only about the extreme examples outlined in this article. Practicing empathy in our daily lives can help us prepare for when we need it to problem solve, while making the world a better place in the process. As kids we used our imaginations to be super heroes or travel to far off places. As adults we still have the power of imagination, we just might need to dust off the cobwebs. Find an everyday activity where you can practice empathy for someone else. The next time you get coffee and it’s busy, try to imagine yourself as the barista. Observe how the people ordering are treating them and the general atmosphere of people who are waiting. What feelings are you experiencing, are you anxious or relaxed? How do the customers impact those feelings? Do you find yourself wanting to interact with them differently once it’s your turn to order?
How we think, act and behave makes sense to us because we’re intimately familiar with our own life experiences. We have no idea how a person’s life has shaped their behaviors, choices and attitudes. Practicing empathy at a small scale exercises the skill in our brains. The more we practice empathy in our everyday lives, the deeper we will be able to go when we truly need it to problem solve.
If you or someone you know needs help, don’t hesitate to reach out to these resources:
Works Consulted:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201505/empathy-vs-sympathy
A Fusion publication. We are employees of UHG and these views are our own and not those of the company nor its affiliates.
